Posts from 13 December 2014

Well, that was surprising. Javascript, right now, feels like dirty C with closures, which is well up my alley.

Javascript (aka ECMAscript) is NOT Java, btw.

For overview, we did a lot of basic stuff—array manipulation, iteration and recursion, and so on. The thinking was pretty standard, considering that we'd seen some of the problems on the prep work, in the first week, and again on the first assessment… at this point, my brain is pretty much prepped to think about how to solve this particular set of problems.

I was kind of thinking the other day that I'd like to be able to play with C/C++ again one day, and … jeez, the syntax of Javascript is all C. It's not surprising if the story we were told in lecture was true, viz. the creator of JS having to design the language spec in basically a week. "Good artists create, great artists steal," as they say, and the best place to steal from in the programming world seems to be C.

I was afraid that it would be a lot more troublesome than it was, given how many JS readings we have (and how many I didn't quite read). Other than some hair-pulling over trying to figure out exactly what a closure is, I think the day went pretty smoothly. My partner was having a slightly harder time with the algorithms than I was, so I tried to pace myself to allow him the time to get more out of the day, but I can feel that I'll probably look more intensely at JS over the weekend than Rails or Ruby. This all even though most of my to-do list consists of lingering Ruby and Rails work that I want to tie off.

Ahead of us: more .css fundamentals, a lot more JS readings, and then putting it all together. After the semi-slog that was Rails, I'm okay moving on, even if it is a LOT to process.